By Erin Free
Alex Proyas is in Sydney, and FilmInk is in Sydney, but due to Hollywood rigmarole, our phone interview is being connected via satellite through his new film’s studio in the states. “Both of our voices are going twice across the Pacific, so there’ll be an annoying pause between questions,” the affable and engagingly thoughtful filmmaker laughs. This kind of unnecessary formality is, appropriately enough, indicative of the cruelly frequent banding of red tape around the cinematic output of Alex Proyas. Whether it’s the inordinate amount of time that it takes for his films (which include the impressive genre flicks, Dark City, I, Robot, and Knowing) to get off the ground; the disappointing failure of projects to get up at all (his dark fantasy, Paradise Lost, famously and sadly fell apart, even with a cast and script in place); or the tragic passing of a leading man during shooting (Brandon Lee on The Crow), Proyas has constantly been beset by meddling and misfortune.
His new film, Gods Of Egypt, has been typically long-in-development, but he’s nearly at the finish line. “It’s pretty much done,” Proyas says. “We’re just tidying things up. It’s been a long haul because there are so many visual effects. It has more visual effects than anything that I’ve ever done. It feels like I’ve been making it forever. It’s intended to be a fun adventure movie in the tradition of The Man Who Would Be King and Raiders Of The Lost Ark…the kind of movies that my dad took me to when I was a kid. I hope that it will be embraced. I look forward to handing my child over to the audience in the next couple of weeks,” he laughs.
Of Greek heritage but born in Egypt (the family relocated to Australia when he was three-years-old), the film’s subject matter has been something of a holy grail for Proyas. “I’ve always wanted to make a movie about mythological Egypt,” the director explains. “My grandad told me those stories when I was a kid, but I’ve never been able to find a way into the subject. I’ve read many, many scripts about ancient Egypt over the years, and the right one eventually came along. I got the first draft of this script, and it provided an intriguing way in to this story. The hook for me was that it was very much the story of the gods, Horus and Set, but as seen through the eyes of a mortal. That’s how I got it to work dramatically.”
And as with Dark City and Knowing, Proyas got Gods Of Egypt to work in Australia, with the bulk of the shoot and post-production done in Sydney. “It changes like the wind,” the filmmaker replies when asked if it’s difficult to convince American studios to shoot in Australia. “It has a lot to do with the fluctuations in the Aussie dollar, and how incentivised the studios are to shoot here. I’d love to make every movie here. I live in Sydney, I love working here, and the best film people in the world are here. I try and shoot here every time. Sometimes it becomes difficult, and we continue to rely upon the support of the tax rebates that we have here, and they’re extremely helpful. They’re integral to getting large scale movies made here because there are so many other film centres around the world that also provide very good incentives. So we try every time, and sometimes we get to shoot here, like we did with Gods Of Egypt. It doesn’t take much to convince an actor to shoot in Sydney, and thanks to digital technology, it gets easier and easier every day.”
The shoot may have been a relatively smooth one, but Gods Of Egypt has continued Proyas’ dance with bad luck, with the film attacked before its release for its Anglo-centric casting (Gerard Butler, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Brenton Thwaites star), despite its Middle Eastern setting. “Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life as a filmmaker working in 2016,” Proyas sighs of the pre-release bashing that he’s copped on the web. “It’s hardly a new experience for me. The internet is rife with people seemingly negative towards every movie that gets made. They’re particularly negative about the visual effects, and visual effects in trailers. I hear that every time, and it does wear a little thin. Right now, there’s a great deal of focus on diversity in Hollywood, which is absolutely a justified concern, but I don’t think this movie is the right one to use as a soapbox for that debate. But then again, that’s the world that we live in.”
It’s certainly not an aspect of filmmaking that Alex Proyas learned about during his days at The Australian Film, Television, And Radio School. “You survive through experience, and it becomes a common situation after a while,” the director says of working in Hollywood, and the pain that can come with it. “There’s no way that you can explain to a novice filmmaker what they’re going to experience in the big, bad world of Hollywood movie-making. You have to experience it yourself to fully understand.”
Gods Of Egypt is released in cinemas on February 25.
